Electrical wire harnesses are assemblies of conductors found in nearly all equipment involving electrically energized devices. In today's world, virtually every kind of airplane, appliance, X-ray device, yacht, ship, and piece of heavy equipment has an electrical nervous or power system which requires a harness.
The harnesses range in complexity from a simple harness for a household appliance to the extremely complicated harnesses used in airliners, jet fighters and other military aircraft, having many miles of wire, and scores of different kinds of wires arranged in hundreds of different subcircuits.
Another important parameter that plays into the harness making business is the number of identical harnesses to be made in a single run. Clearly it is much more practical to set up an automated facility for manufacturing a refrigerator/freezer wiring harness which is rather simple to start with and will be made in the hundreds of thousands, than to set up an automated facility to produce several hundred extremely complicated harnesses for a jet fighter.
Steps to automate the harness-making process have been tried for years, but success has been restricted to limited applications. A body of technology capable of economically manufacturing harnesses through the use of computers, robotics, and other automation techniques, does not yet exist to handle the wide variety of harness-making tasks necessitated by modern technology. However, with the continuing advancements of the state of the art in the fields of robotics and computer control of machine systems, increasing opportunities exist to apply these technologies successfully to a wide range of harness-making applications.
The inventor of the herein disclosed invention has also developed a universal form board assembly which can be adapted to form virtually any wire harness, virtually irrrespective of the size of the harness, as the form board system is modular. He has also developed, among other related inventions, a system and a technology for easily engaging and identifying the beginning and terminating portions of a wire in a harness, and automatically identifying, at all of the breakout points along the harness, both the source and the destination of the wire entering and exiting the breakout.
Through the instant disclosure, the inventor provides another automated step in the sequence of producing, through automation technology, wiring harnesses of virtually any kind. The final result of this pursuit will be the capability of producing any wiring harness within a certain range of parameters by the manipulation of a data base.